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Designing A Logo

Posted by Pragmatic Design on 2 November 2009 | 12 Comments

We've just designed a new logo and corporate ID for ourselves, but creating a logo is about more than just drawing a pretty picture- it should also show your businesses purpose and values from it. We'll take you through the process of designing a logo.

The Objective

In order to design a logo and corporate identity, you first need to establish what you want from it. In our case, we wanted our customers to feel the freshness of our work and the openness of our approach. Since we started up two years ago, we've become involved in marketing businesses, and need the logo to convey our motto "better communication by design". As we are a business-to-business organisation, the look must be "corporate".

The Solution

The logo

The "P" and "D" of "Pragmatic Design have been re-interpreted into speech-mark type symbols to reflect that we are a company where our communication services are integrated into our purpose. The typeface (a modern san-serif font aptly named "Insignia") is strong, yet open and clear, giving a solid, stable and reassuring quality. The slight drop-shadow shows our desire to stand out from the rest.

Colours

The blue represents "blue-sky thinking" (yes, we know it's a nasty cliche, but it still holds true) and is a throwback to the colouring on our previous website- important to hold a link to your past. The purple represents depth. By fading through the logo in a vignette, where the "P" and "D" speech marks are sky blue, and our company name represents depth, we create a strong image (a contemporary splash of colour).

A very lighted coloured background ensures that the page feels open and modern, and guarantees a high level of readability. It also means that we can use white as a colour in areas which we'd like to stand out (like the side-bar adverts).

Thankfully, the days of worrying about how your logo would look on a fax are pretty much gone- but don't underestimate how important it is for a logo to work in monochrome. Most photocopiers are still mono, and print on promotional items (ie pens, diaries, etc) are likely to be in only one colour too. With this in mind, the vignette can easily be substituted for a single colour with no loss of impact.

Typefaces

We've already covered the use of the logo's font, but Insignia makes a poor body font (and we really wouldn't want to use our main display font throughout our copy), so we needed something clean, modern and open. We wanted to be able to use the same typeface on our website as on our printed material too, which is rather limiting!

We have come up with a bit of a cheat. Many computers (especially Apple Macs) come with Helvetica Light installed. Light, open, easy to read and leaving the page feeling very "open". Second choice for the web would therefore have to be Arial- not as light and open, but still clean and modern (despite its age).

The Conclusion

You've looked at the logo (if you haven't seen it, scroll up to the top of the page), and we hope you'll agree that it encompasses everything that we set out to achieve!